


Opposition

by aerialiste



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Croatoan/Endverse, Castiel Masturbates, I'm Going to Hell, Inspired by Fanfiction, M/M, Masturbation in Shower, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 02:27:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4122559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerialiste/pseuds/aerialiste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What Castiel imagines in the privacy of the shower is between him and the water pressure, which, depressingly enough, may at this point qualify as a regular sex partner if qualification is based on interaction.”</p><p>An indecent interlude, set between between chapters 2 and 3 of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/2664854?view_full_work=true">A Thousand Lights in Space</a>, Book III of the epic perfection that is <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/seperis/pseuds/seperis">seperis</a>'s <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/series/110651">Down to Agincourt</a>—which you should drop everything to read, certainly before stooping to this ink-wasting toy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Opposition

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TKodami](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TKodami/gifts).
  * Inspired by [A Thousand Lights in Space](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2664854) by [seperis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seperis/pseuds/seperis). 



_Before Dean can suggest more coffee—maybe on the porch—Cas reaches for his laptop, flipping on the screen again. Okay. "So—got some work to do?"_

_"Finish the alterations to the patrol schedule," Cas says, typing in his password on the obnoxiously blue Windows start-up screen. "If we're leaving in two days, I need to have this completed. Why?"_

_Seeing Cas already lost in the wonders of spreadsheets, he sighs, getting to his feet. "No reason. I'm gonna go unpack."_

 

_\--Day 119.5--_

As soon as Castiel hears the bedroom door close behind Dean, he goes back to rapid-fire typing, not least so that Dean will hear the laptop keys clicking and assume it’s safe to unpack in peace and then—do whatever he’s going to do. Which, presumably, because he’s still not nearly as robust and vibrant with ruddy good health as he likes to pretend, will involve being asleep almost before he’s under the covers or even fully out of his clothes. Castiel hopes.

Since he’s now stuck pretending to work, he glares briefly but expressively at the bedroom door before closing his eyes again and concentrating, always mildly surprised by his own interest in the efficient organization of a small human garrison. He updates the schedule, saves it as both Excel file and PDF, makes a few notes in a text document for Amanda (he’ll finish a list of suggestions for her in the morning, before Dean wakes), then exits Office, logs out, and closes the laptop inaudibly—all with his eyes still shut, all well inside of a minute. Sits unmoving, head bent, not-thinking. Not-listening.

From the bedroom, the sound of Dean’s boots hitting the floor. The zipper of his duffel, soft sounds of fabric being dumped out, metal D-rings clinking together as Dean shoves the emptied bag under the bed.

Castiel reaches up to push back his hair and winds up unconsciously fisting both hands in his bangs; _not-listening, not-listening_. Dresser drawers open, close. Metallic objects clatter against wood as Dean disarms all over the room, in a pattern that to someone else might sound cavalier or thoughtless.

He had, he reflects neutrally, done a more than passable job of seeming indifferent to Dean’s unannounced reappearance. He allows himself to feel brief self-congratulation at successfully concealing the fact that his eyes had started to water and his heart rate tripled. Why the experience of seeing Dean again after such a brief absence should feel somehow even more excruciating than the already quite adequately excruciating experience of seeing him continually, Castiel isn’t sure.

He understands the theory behind missing someone, obviously: limbic resonance ends in physical discomfort when co-regulatory processes are abruptly severed. Mammalian amygdalae ensure the nuanced affect necessary for intricate tribal life by synchronizing pair bonds—each body’s rhythm shifts, adjusting to match and mirror the intimate other’s. Pulse rates, pupil dilation, microexpressions, the pheromonal attunement of which few are conscious, to the point that most people will cherish the beloved’s clothing without asking why. Yet despite all this, humans persist in the belief that they’re separate entities, individual unto themselves, with a characteristic stubbornness which used to amuse him—such a distinctly mortal exceptionalism, so familiarly perverse it’s almost endearing.

If he’s honest, he hasn’t found it funny in a long time. Certainly not since he realized about the breathing; that you can get used to it, and then when it’s gone—

He hadn’t known. Until Kansas City, he hadn’t _known,_ not really; and now this is different and in its own way even worse and he hadn’t known about it either. He couldn't have been prepared for the tight discomfort that radiates through his entire torso when he can’t hear Dean sipping coffee or reading or just _existing_ somewhere nearby; when he can’t snag his gaze over everyone’s heads during a meeting (both their faces blank, because they no longer need facial expressions to communicate, somehow, and Cas isn’t sure when or how that happened). There's a muddled alarm, perplexing in its irrationality, when too many hours have passed without feeling the distinct atmospheric pressure change which means Dean has entered the room, or when Cas can’t be assured of startling a laugh out of him at least twice a day (and more often if he can feign contemptuous boredom convincingly enough to summon it, ideally sparking an awakening glitter in Dean’s eyes, the sought-after accompaniment to his loose-limbed, easy grin, if Castiel has done his work correctly and managed to rile him up enough to retort in kind).

It wasn't like this before; but now when Dean leaves, in his wake is a grim colorless null space, and after only a few hours Castiel is at risk of crawling out of his skin and/or throwing precisely the kind of party he's sworn off for good, until in a lather of inadmissable anxiety he abruptly decides to spearhead large-scale kitchen construction projects, the more complicated the better, about which he knows next to nothing.

And now, apparently, even more cruelly, it's also going to present some _new_ what-fresh-hell-is-this difficulty when Dean comes back, which just has _no_ justice to it; that he can show up, pause in their doorway—an adjective and noun combination neither of them could have foreseen four months ago—and without any observable effort suck _all the air_ out of the cabin, coalesce reality around himself, somehow render everything else a dull blurry sketch. It's as though Castiel can’t help but adjust his focal length to an oscillating unit of measurement exactly the distance of one Dean Winchester, next to whom everything else turns unimportant background.

He moves up onto the couch from the floor and tugs at his hair again, resenting the new buzz of queasiness he'd felt behind his solar plexus when he felt Dean watching him from the door, which is why he deliberately ignored him and kept typing. For his many sins, Castiel thinks, he still never deserved this, that every time it feels like it’s happening all over again for the first time. He didn't ask for the lurch in his chest when Dean smiles at him artlessly, the itch under his palms when he brushes past, the ache in his eyeteeth, the truly bizarre way his tongue seems to swell inside his mouth and saliva collects under his tongue—it’s preposterous, he even has to _swallow_ more frequently and this is _utterly_ _unacceptable._

He could start running, he thinks dazedly, opening his eyes but not quite focusing them. Running would produce phenethylamine, anandamide, other endogenous cannabinoid-like endorphins. He’s never been able to let himself float on them during training sessions, never allowed himself, too focused on avoiding wholesale grievous bodily harm to his students; what if he took up running? If he stuck to a identified, well-cleared path at specified times, he could move at a comfortable speed. The likelihood of his inadvertently hurting anyone would be reduced. And since amphetamines are an exogenous attempt to synthesize the natural euphoriant effect of—

Dean having finished disposing of various weapons, now there’s the swish of jeans being tugged off, followed by softer sounds of socks and, and other items of clothing, Castiel definitely does not need to think about those items or what parts of anyone’s body they might touch. For example, a particular pair of well-fitting boxer briefs in dark heathered gray, which Dean might be wearing since they are (understandably) his favorite—or at any rate he seems to wear them frequently around Castiel, who maintains a vigilant selective memory lapse when it comes to collecting unwashed laundry. Speaking of pheromones.

There's a long pause. He doesn’t listen to the pause, or try to picture what might be happening during it.

He swallows with a convulsive click which suddenly makes him think he needs to find something else to do besides sitting not-listening to not-sounds from the bedroom. One at a time, he pries his hands from his hair, registering the sting where he’s gripped at his scalp, and stands up, making sure the laptop is safely in the middle of the coffee table and collecting used cups and spoons to return to the kitchen.

From there, Castiel discovers, he can still hear sounds from the bathroom very clearly; he files away this information for later scheduling purposes. Dean’s decided he’s awake enough to brush his teeth, and beneath the splash of running water is a burr of foamy, surprisingly melodic humming, which he only does when he’s relaxed and contented, when his muscles have gone slack and warm before sleep and it would be the most natural, sensible thing in existence to come up behind him, wrap arms around his waist and congratulate him altogether less verbally on acquiring their first batch of recruits. Easy to pull him backward, nuzzle the tender spot between neck and shoulder, smile against the skin there, nose up toward the prickly edge of his hairline, still growing out, as Dean takes a quick breath in and says his name, with a question mark at the end— ****

Castiel leans his forehead against the refrigerator, rolling it back and forth against the cool enameled metal. He’s fine. He’s completely fine. He just needs—he’ll be _fine_.

The toilet seat hits the back of the tank with a porcelain clang—Castiel insists on leaving it down, Bobby having impressed upon him at some point or another the mysterious social importance of this. A flush, the sink again; the bathroom light flicking off. Dean evidently pauses to stretch as he pads back toward bed, accompanied by a long, poorly stifled groan of heartfelt relief, another one of those ambiguous vocalizations to which Castiel's entire body seems to respond as if in an entirely different context.

(Do other people find every nonverbal sound Dean makes to be pornographic? Surely they'd never be able to function; it must be just him. Not for the last time, Castiel thinks he would prefer to have average human hearing.)

Rustle of quilt and sheets being pulled back and the implacable squeal of mattress springs, a drawn-out rusty complaint which Dean seems unable to avoid no matter how carefully he lies down or rolls over. Castiel doesn’t mind this feature of the mattress since it reliably tells him how deeply asleep Dean is, should he need to slip out, or—as tonight—gain access to the shower without waking him.

It’s too cold to go outside, he tells himself reasonably; and the hot water tank is full, and being warm and wet in his own skin with Dean one room over is—he agrees with himself—a fair compromise given what he would rather be doing. It's the least he could require, just to get by. Good, then. Everyone concurs. He asks for so little, really, the bare minimum needed to survive yet another night having to share the _same fucking cabin_. Fortunately it’s the end of the world, and Castiel counts on that a lot, because it means he probably won’t have to live another forty or fifty years feeling his veins slowly burning up from the inside out as he chivalrously goes on ignoring the fact that every time Dean opens that mouth—which, yes: _gorgeous_ —he wants to climb inside it.

More mattress protestations. A paperback drops onto the floor, followed by muttering as a pillow's punched and then wadded in half; the snick of the bedside lamp. Another exhalation. This one softer.

Castiel waits. In the meantime, to fend off thinking about how easy it would be to cross the thirty feet between them and just crawl into bed next to Dean, that much closer to his warmth, his stupidly comforting smell (cordite, maybe, and blackberry; something deceptively metallic and spicy, but with an unexpected sweet powdery tone beneath) and the sleepy huff of his laugh (“What, Cas—you want a bedtime story?”)—instead of entertaining impossibilities, he considers the hippocampus (which, it happens, looks nothing like either a river horse _or_ an actual sea monster, though it does resemble a sea _horse_ ) and the way it gamely participates in limbic resonance, or more accurately co-evolved to support its phylogeny. These are good things to think about; he will think on these things.

He further considers (pinot gris overlaid with gun oil? civet undercut with peach skin?) the relationship between damaged limbic systems and his own early inability to gauge appropriate physical behavior around others, for example, personal space, yielding incessant violations of same. It had taken months after he Fell, the better part of the entire first year, for his badly injured midbrain to repair itself without Grace, a time during which he could not reroute everything through his neocortex as previously, the way he'd done as an envesseled soldier, memorizing and archiving information pertaining to physical relationships, constructing an approximation of a person.

Leave it to the Host, he thinks resentfully (by this point pressing his entire body from cheek to pelvis against the refrigerator, reasons unclear) to find a way to tatter and shred, singe and cauterize more than just wings. A burnt-out hippocampus and frayed amygdala, structures he’d had to rebuild as if he were an isolate, reared in a basement since infancy by expressionless caregivers made of chickenwire. Maybe not a bad description of the Host, come to think of it. That he isn't a total sociopath is actually in and of itself amazing; Bobby deserves more credit for this than anyone realizes.

The months after that spent wrapped up in sexual exploration hadn’t been an accident, either. Not all of it had been pleasant, or more accurately, uninflected with pain. But he couldn’t mimic limbic behavior by rote anymore; it had to be relearned from the inside, gradually, experientially. Fortunately the built-in reward system offered incentive, since at the time Dean’s audibly gritted teeth hadn’t proven an adequate negative reinforcement (“oh for the love of—you're kidding me, right? Come on, man; thought you were beyond that staring-without-blinking shit”).

The only person he’d ever discussed any of this with was, logically, Vera, who not only shared his own lack of taboo around the polymorphous intersection of pain and pleasure but who—later, after they’d eased into an altogether less physically frenzied friendship—brought up the medical model of the triune brain, using it to outline why she thought Castiel might be unusually susceptible to substance abuse. In specific, Vera suggested, it might explain his taste for both opiates and alcohol as well as stimulants, when most addicts had a distinct preference for one class or the other.

Her theory seemed sound. He’d been more vulnerable than anyone had realized or cared, and amygdala hijack could still waylay him with thrashing panic if he lowered his guard (or, apparently, if the last light left in all the world lay, neck snapped, in the dirt of a bombed-out courtyard run wild with unchecked roses).

Still, on some level he'd realized his own fundamental dysregulation, and concluded that he could and should increase the strength of said guard—his inner wards, as it were—psychopharmaceutically if necessary, alternating amphetamines with sedatives, hypnotics with hallucinogens; and also allowing himself as much compulsive reward-seeking behavior involving other people’s bodies as possible. Preferably unclad and in company (or, whenever feasible, both).

Castiel thinks it might have been easier having to experience dispositive emotions and unfulfillable desires, back when he was high all the time and regularly had his body pressed against someone else’s, maybe. He can’t remember all or even very much of it, so he has no way to be sure. He does miss the sleek comfort of skin. He misses being touched.

The refrigerator falls silent with a gurgle. In the abrupt hush, the cabin feels more still; he raises his head to listen more closely. A charitable person wouldn’t say that Dean is snoring, exactly, but Castiel isn't charitable (or for that matter, technically, a person). Regardless, this is probably his best chance.

He's inside the bathroom before Dean's next exhalation, door shut behind him, pulling off his shirt over his head by the collar. The shower never seems to wake Dean once he’s properly asleep, and Castiel’s progression from kitchen through bedroom had been soundless. He leaves the light off; he can shower in the dark and in some ways it makes the next part easier. Kicking off his pants, albeit with difficulty—he hadn’t been kidding with Vera, about the Pavlovian conditioning—he slides back the shower curtain in one movement, not rattling a single ring. Silence, from this point forward, becomes crucial.

There's an immediate imperative throb as what feels like most of the blood in his body suddenly surges between his legs. He grimaces, hastily twisting both taps open. It's already harder to breathe, a struggle not to touch himself. He doesn't wait for the water to heat, just steps under the spray, not bothering with soap or shampoo, since that's not what this is about. First frigid, then scalding water hammers down onto his chest, and he gulps for air. Brushes a circle around one nipple with already shaking fingers, hisses a curse before pinching down hard and inhaling sharply through his nose, dick twitching in response.

Before Kansas City, he’d done this very seldom, as there’d never been a shortage of partners and he found that the more people involved, the greater the relief. Now, thanks to Dean’s continual affable proximity—and the rush of plain lust that he supposes he can look forward to whenever Dean reappears after a two-day absence—he only has himself, and everything is exquisitely, wretchedly sensitized, and none of that changes anything.

He has to clench his jaw, hard, as soon as he feels the spatter of water across his lips and throat, and dig his fingers into his own hipbones to keep from—and he hasn’t even—he hasn’t _even_. It’s not fair, none of it has ever _been_ fair.

Dean has remarked pointedly on his five-minute military showers more than once, as if questioning their hygienic efficiency (with as much of a raised eyebrow as he’s capable of mustering). And yes—Cas can be noiseless, and he can be inhumanly fast, in this as much as in close-quarters combat or catching water glasses and pens before they slide from table to floor. But he wants neither of these tonight. He wants—

He wants the man in the next room. He wants Dean, and wants him so badly he was grateful to be seated when Dean sauntered in tonight, smirking and pleased with himself, because Castiel was afraid if they'd both been standing he might have moved toward him without thinking. He wants Dean acutely, so much so that even during inappropriate public moments, he sometimes feels a flush of desire so weakening that, in those moments, he couldn’t make a fist if he had to (fortunately sarcasm doesn’t require gross motor control). He wants him when he wakes up, almost before he’s even past the first ugly shock of consciousness; he wants him, with astonishing consistency, every time he sees him, all day long; and he wants him all night, for interminable hours as he lies sleepless on the couch, mind alternating between trying not to think about Dean's body and, paradoxically, obsessive attempts to visualize it. The more Dean is warm and interested and protective and _curious_ , the more he banters and laughs and has ideas and makes _plans_ , the more Castiel’s performance of brittle hostility mutates in spite of himself, softens into something arch and playful rather than automatically catty—and the more his body wants to touch Dean’s, instinctively, phototropically, like a plant turns toward the sun or birds tilt their beaks up into the rain or infants smile back at adults, and it’s completely terrible and _it’s getting worse not better_.

Under the warmth of the water, his eyelids flutter down again, imprinted behind their lids a particular movement Dean keeps making, over and over, almost as if he has no idea what he’s doing ( _how can he have no idea what he’s doing_ ), a repeated gesture Castiel legitimately fears will eventually cause him to lose control; something inside his skull will audibly snap and he’ll surge forward and press Dean down onto whatever surface presents itself first no matter what they’re doing or who’s there. It’s that unselfconscious stretch, the one that makes his t-shirt ride up and jeans sag down to reveal his stomach, that mouth-watering two inches (three on a good day) of bare lightly freckled skin, dusted with fine, pale, almost golden hair, a twist of muscle beneath the softness—

He opens his mouth, lets warm water fall into it and fill it for a moment as he lets go of his hips and slides both hands across to brush over that same place on his own body. His muscles quiver under the touch, stomach taut and flat and frustratingly not someone else’s. He palms his midriff, imagining what it would be like to tighten his fingers around Dean’s wrists, hard enough to to leave marks; and, while Dean’s still bewildered, trying to figure out what’s going on (“Is this—is this a fight, are we in a fight?”), Castiel would lower his mouth to that bared expanse of skin. He imagines that he presses slow, deliberate kisses into it, whispers indecencies against the skin, noses the shirt farther upward. Tongues into Dean's navel until he gasps, licks along the bottom of his ribcage, slipping back down unexpectedly (Dean flinches) to nip and worry and sink his teeth into the lush flesh, sucking a sloppy darkening bruise to mark the exposed territory so that the _next_ time Dean lets his stupid shirt ride up again, everyone around him will widen their eyes and _know_ —the campwide fable of their epic romance surprising precisely no one, only at last giving him the satisfaction of knowing he made it true, knowing Dean let him do that; that maybe he even wanted it, wants Castiel as much as Castiel wants him.

The sound Dean makes forces him, in his mind, to hook his fingers into the still-loose waistband and tug it down another inch, laving and biting into the flushed skin of Dean's stomach, until his hands fly up to sift through the strands of hair at the nape of Cas’s neck; so then Cas _has_ to undo the top button of those jeans and lick the newly exposed skin, pressing his palm against the denim below—at which, despite himself, Dean whimpers—

The whimper, Castiel accepts, might have come from himself just now. He shakes his head to clear it, spits water, backs away from the warmth of the spray, sweat standing out on his forehead and upper lip, and braces himself against the shower wall, tile reassuringly solid against his back. Closes his eyes again and spreads his stance, exhaling shakily. The water is still adequately hot but he’d better not draw this out indefinitely, not if he wants to remain quiet so that he doesn’t wake Dean.

(Does he want to wake Dean? What if he allowed his voice the same freedom as his hands, and Dean heard—)

Deliberately blotting that out with sensation, he drags his fingers up the insides of his thighs, swallowing another profanity, in what language he’s not sure—a lot of consonants; his cerebral cortex has gone offline. Doing this sober is different from stoned in many respects, not least that if he’s high, his filter’s down and he talks endlessly, speaks in indiscriminate dialects and diction sets and lexical registers, whereas being as miserably unfucked-up as he is right now, he can’t assemble language at all. Nothing’s muted, everything’s raw and inescapable, awareness contracted to the roughness of his palms against the tender skin at the top of each thigh, the crease where coarse hair meets damp delicate crêpe.

It’s too much, it’s not enough, he feels furious and wild and desperate and how dare Dean first _die_ on him, leave him trapped here alone, and then come back and do _this_ to him, and why aren’t his penitent lips currently wrapped around—

Castiel's core muscles contract at the image and he hunches over, slipping a little against the tile. A shiver ripples through him and he finally concedes, moves both hands to his dick, left index and thumb lightly circling the base, fingertips drifting back behind his testicles, cupping them, his right hand sliding the foreskin back and forth, slick with precome beneath the hood. He’s never been sure how Jimmy Novak of all good Catholic boys wasn’t circumcised, but luck had been on his side there, as in so many ways when his was the vessel Castiel had taken. Even human, his refractory period was short to nonexistent, only lately a predicament given the limitations of the hot water tank and the unremittingly adolescent quality of his desire to—honestly? To haul Dean in here with him, shove him up against the tile, and make his eyes roll back in his head.

_(He lets go at Dean's dreamy nod, opening eyes gone vague and soft before slumping back against the trunk of the tree behind him with an audible sigh of heartfelt satisfaction. With no effort whatsoever, he can think of a dozen ways to assure Dean looks like that several times a day—)_

And that’s the problem, Castiel manages to think against the flare of pleasure, abandoning any ideas about holding out and starting to jack himself as slowly as he can, twisting his face to one side so his mouth is pressed against his upper arm, pressure an inadequate approximation of what he craves: what’s maddening about jerking off is that it’s not himself to whom he wants to give these sensations. It’s a perverse punishment, akin to something the Host would devise—being permitted to do only to his own body everything he aches to do to Dean’s. He scrapes his teeth across the bicep, tongues at its salt, then buries a strangled noise when he inevitably starts stroking faster, helplessly wondering how Dean likes to come when he does this, does he prefer more than one way, has he been using his left hand instead of his right since being injured, what does he do with his other hand, how long does he try to keep from coming, does he tease himself to make it last, does he find that place where he’s close and linger inside it, what flickers through his mind when he finally gives in and lets it happen—

Longing coils deep in his pelvis and he tightens his grip, water concealing the muted thud as fist strikes pubic bone more and more insistently.

Castiel shudders, muffles a groan against his arm, somehow simultaneously imagining several things at once: Dean sucking him off (eyes hazy with desire, looking up at him uncertain but willing, Cas managing not to claw at his shoulders but steadying his voice—not to reassure, not encourage him gently, that’s not how they work, but to sidestep his insecurity, slide inside the punch with some dry piece of education or sardonic instruction, a pointed comment, a direct order to make Dean’s eyes flash, to kick in his reactive pride and spite, to trigger that part of him that has long since ceased to be anyone's blunt little instrument, yet still, Cas knows—he _knows_ this—yearns to cede that terrifying level of internalized responsibility to someone who can contain it easily and hold him completely, without effort, so that he can break apart without shame). He imagines this while also pierced by sensations of doing the same thing to Dean, both arms wrapped around his ass to hold him as closely as possible, unable to breathe while demonstrating his utter commitment to dragging him in more deeply and tightening his throat around the perfect head of his cock, entire being constituted of only one need, one goal: _make Dean scream_.

It’s too good and he wrenches his attention back, yanking his hand away thoroughly, almost savagely, pressing both palms against the tile, panting as his dick twitches and bobs and drips, and he laughs silently at himself, mouth twisting, and edges back from the thought of Dean shouting his name when he comes.

Deep-throating came almost too easily after he Fell, since his relationships with food and nausea and oxygen and the gag reflex were already completely cross-wired; he’d had lovers who struggled to perform the act and he felt sympathy, and no desire to press the matter, but he himself never had any hesitation, no flare of panic, only the craving to—in this particular case, especially—draw the beloved so far into him that he would be, even briefly, a part of Castiel, his personal scream-singing Host of one.

While the delicate aggression of ravaging labia and crura, clitoris and mons was a skill he’d picked up early, it had nonetheless required practice as well as a precise reading of each partner’s individual responses (knowledge of distinct tastes and kinds of wetness helped, and understanding their correspondence to hormonal phases—learning the differences between savory, sugary citrus, salted almond, until he knew when to pull back and circle with tongue-tip versus when to growl and lean in with his whole weight). By contrast, sucking cock was something Castiel seemed born, as it were, to do. From the very first time (a heady memory he retained despite having popped an entire club’s worth of MDMA), he all but pounced and seized, took to it with ardor and without qualm, messy and heedless and greedy, mind blissfully full, reduced to the pulse thundering in his ears and the drive to hear his lover lose his shit completely.

When he finally moves his hand back, palm slicked this time with saliva, he can’t see anything; the darkness bleaches into white around his night vision as he slides back the foreskin and fucks hard, once, into the curve of his palm, and then again, and again, this time without holding back. Suddenly it’s not his hand, it’s Dean's, and it’s not uncertain or hesitant, because he wouldn’t be; once Dean's decided to commit to something, he never is. “So what does a guy have to do around here to make you shut the fuck up, huh, Cas?” he murmurs, lips curving against his in a smile before he licks in deeply, holding Cas down against the tile and fucking his tongue into Cas's mouth, hand between his legs shifting gears from something calculated and tormenting into ferocious and incendiary, like sparring, like a firefight. Dean _would_ be this way, Castiel thinks, frenzied, he _would_ end up having to cling to him while he works Cas over like a speed bag, the strong tight hand on his cock going from hot malicious velvet (Cas writhing underneath, lips compressed so he doesn’t plead) to the consistent relief of fast perfect strokes; then dialed back down again, sweet long pulls alternating with quick flicks over the head that have him digging his fingers into the slick planes of Dean’s back muscles, not even minding his incredulous laugh (because Dean isn’t mocking him, only marveling), the puff of air against his collarbone right before Dean whispers, “Cas, fuck, _baby_ ,” and bites down, and he fights not to cry out when Dean slows once more, but only for a single liquid pump, and then it’s like lightning turned to merciful silk as his hand flies over Cas, pulling him apart into jagged wet shreds of need, he _will_ beg, he can’t _not_ —

When Castiel tears his hand away this time, it’s almost too late. This is taking longer, he thinks dazedly, than he intended. The water has gone from hot to warm, his heart pounding in his throat. He should finish—

He’s in the bedroom with Dean, kneecaps bony on the cabin floor as he pulls the loosened jeans off all the way (those green eyes are stunned but no one's saying anything to stop him, so Cas is not about to stop). He wrenches down Dean’s boxers and without preamble, without even pausing, fucks his own mouth open on that devastatingly beautiful cock (it has to be, all the rest of Dean is enough to make angels stumble), pulling back only long enough to suck in air and then shove relentlessly forward again until Dean falters back against the bed and Cas pushes him onto it and kneels over him swallowing, rippling his throat around the satiny head of him, other hand unfurling between Dean's legs and pressing into the soft places that make choked sounds come out of him, make him swell against Castiel's tongue. Despite having reshaped his body Castiel has never seen him fully hard, only glimpsed other intermediate states; and why Dean thinks being seen naked at all is acceptable Cas is never going to ask, because what if he then stopped wandering around in varying stages of undress. Cas's peripheral eyesight is more accurate than most people’s central vision and a fraction of a second is all he needed to sear into his maculae, for the rest of conscious existence, a flash of still-damp curled hair, beaded and dark with water, and the half-swollen rosy thickness giving an almost invisible twitch in the bare instant before Dean slid fabric over that treasure, tossing some unrelated comment about solar generators in Cas’s direction, possibly—he might as well have been speaking backward Latin or demotic hippopotamus because Cas’s entire field of mental vision had been momentarily submerged in the overwhelming sensation of rolling that cock experimentally around in his mouth for the few seconds it takes for its fragile soap-tasting length to heat and fill, swell all the way down past his soft palate into his throat where the rumble of a moan makes Dean’s thighs tighten around him. At which point Cas backs off, sucking; concentrates on the head, hollows his cheeks, teases out the first bittersalt drops, swipes his tongue again and again under the frenulum and then slides back down until he feels fists clenching in his hair followed by a mumbled apology, because Dean’s like that, trying to be considerate, he won’t let himself move until Cas, impatient, reaches back to grab at his hands and just _put_ them there, shoving hard at his own head until Dean gets the message and fucks tentatively forward, cursing and saying his name—

That’s it, that’s the thought that has his balls drawing up painfully tight and he’s so close now, pressing hard against the tile to hold himself up because his knees are trembling and his hips jerk backward, as if he’s trying to get away from his hand not move into it, trying to oppose the pleasure, to avoid it, breath harsh in his lungs, staccato if he’d stop holding it. He fights to slow each stroke, make it as long and gliding as he can stand (he can’t, suddenly too close to edge or surf this one out), impossibly hard, each slick twist filling him even more, his asshole clenching, _almost_ , so close, if he can just—this is the point at which his lovers have cried out things he found strange at first— _no, I can’t, no, please_ —half in desperation but half in an odd kind of fear, and it was finally one couple in particular who modeled for him how to cradle his partners at that oblique moment and radiate safety, breathe trust into their mouths, not to let up or pull back or move away, not to alter speed or pressure but to continue, deliberately, relentlessly, exactly whatever movement he’s making against or inside them, fixing them in place with words and gaze and unhesitating unwavering friction: _yes, yes you can, it’s okay, I’ve got you, let go, come for me now_ —something no one has ever said to or done for Castiel, who always tops no matter what his spatial position in the arrangement, who always makes sure he is assumed to be above needing either tenderness or permission.

In the absence of anyone to ground him, help him surrender even for an instant, his mind thrashes, flailing for the thought, the image, the one thing to topple him over the precipice. That sheerly appreciative moan Dean couldn’t hold back earlier, gazing into a bowl of beef stew like it could tell the future (as Cas’s fingers momentarily froze over the keyboard, and then he calmly resumed typing, hoping he hadn’t been noticed). The undisguised roughness in Dean's voice when he’d straightened from the contract they’d just signed together, the one that takes the first step toward fighting side-by-side in a war they almost certainly won’t win, so might as well wage with as much conviction as if they know they can.

Finally it hits him and his muscles lock, his entire body goes rigid in the eye of the neural storm: the moment when Dean licks his lips and can’t look away because Castiel has just said, all silk: _People in relationships do that for each other, don't they?_

Those eyes, magnetic and voluptuous and innocently, impossibly,  _edibly_ green—

Cas has come more than once to the thought of their color, just it alone: the curve of iris, mossy and muddy and leafy after illness, the tint of crisp unripe apples when Dean’s delighted, or first thing in the morning before he has time to become defended. That bright segment of pigment is one of the few tiny, minute intersections where a human body stops and its soul begins, where you can almost glimpse it—

“ _Dean_ ,” he chokes out against his arm, biting down in a frantic bid to be quiet, squeezing his eyes shut even more tightly and riding the long drawn-out crest of it, endless, breathless, one hand cupped over the head so he can feel the first warm splatter of come against his own palm and slide it back over the foreskin, hands moving in opposite directions, one dragging down the shaft and one twisting wetly up over the top, breath hitching into a sob and that’s not salt water pricking behind his eyelids, he’s not fighting tears when the next spike hits him, a spasm both sharper and sweeter than the first, radiating everywhere, in his head he’s loud but knows it’s only a ragged whisper, “—oh, fuck—Dean, _fuck_ me, _why_ ,” what kind of answer he’d expect to that in any circumstance, there isn’t one, he can never ask the question, Dean will never let him be close this way, never want him falling to pieces held tightly against his body, coming while looking into his eyes. Castiel's head jerks backward, thuds against the tile as his mouth opens all the way, face taut as the next waves hit him in rapid succession, thighs pressed together to hold him upright against the pleasure but he shakes within each peak of sensation, can’t see, can’t think, there’s nothing to figure out or adjust for or organize against, only this, only the clear fine light that suffuses everything and wraps him inside it, a instant set apart from the anguish of being imprisoned in this godforsaken shell, an increment of reprieve almost as good as pinning a howling, struggling soul to his naked chest, one arm wrapped fiercely around its shoulders, once-strong wings beating solidly through the air, dragging it with him upward, back toward itself.

When he comes down from it, he’s down, as in on the shower stall floor. He's been _gone_. The water is a cool patter across his feet and scalp, and his arms are wrapped around his knees.

After a long vacant moment Castiel unfurls, stretches his legs cautiously. His eyes burn and his cheekbones hurt, and his nose is clogged. But every muscle in his body is practically glowing and he feels—he doesn’t know how he feels. But better. Good. Actually,  _incredible,_ if also a little miffed. How had—this wasn’t supposed to turn into—it was just going to be a quick, mechanical, detached, strictly functional, emotionally repressed, practical—

As Dean would say, rolling his eyes: sure, dude, whatever. Castiel unfolds himself and stands, still trembly, rinses off his hands and stomach; clears his nose, rinses face and hands again and finally turns off the now-icy water. Listens for, ideally, stertorous breathing from the bedroom.

He hears absolutely nothing. _That was nineteen and a half minutes_ , his brain supplies helpfully. Not five minutes; nineteen. … _And a half._ Yes. Excellent.

He gropes past Dean’s towel—wadded over the bar, still damp, not drying out probably in this century—to reach his own, neatly folded. Scrubbing roughly at his hair, he pauses again to listen: there it is, unmistakable. Castiel has more than one reason to be relieved at the otherwise appalling sound. First of all, snoring assures Dean’s deepest, most restful sleep, excellent for both his physical recovery and ongoing well-being. In this particular case it also means he’s not lying there paralyzed with horrified embarrassment, having just been subjected to the unmistakable sounds of Cas getting off—and getting off really fucking thoroughly, let’s be clear—to the thought of _Dean_ , to fantasies of his whole—his _everything_.

(Most of all, Castiel needs to hear Dean snoring because that means he’s breathing; and he’s breathing because he’s still alive.)

Collecting his clothes and padding nude through the bedroom, Cas closes the door behind him and then collapses onto the couch, suddenly too tired to do more than wriggle back into his pants and wad his shirt up under his head as a pillow. Maybe he’ll nap a whole hour; maybe even two. His partners always claim orgasms promote sleep as well as general physical relaxation. Drifting, he’s vaguely aware of feeling his slow-twitch muscle fibers lengthen and grow heavy, as if something’s pushing him down into the couch—as if he’s molten, or disintegrating; but why should that feel good? Disintegration is probably experienced as a bad thing, by most entities—

It’s the last thought Castiel of Chitaqua has for, as it turns out, almost six hours.

•

Dean Winchester, on the other hand, would really,  _really_ like to roll over onto his back, but he can’t do that without setting off the goddamned springs and he’s probably not in the clear yet. So he forces himself to stay uncomfortably propped up on his stomach, trying not to squirm. Cas would presumably rather die than snore like a human-ass being, but if he does go under for a while, even only dozing—which, given what Dean is pretty sure just happened, he’d be amazed if the guy hadn’t passed out briefly in the shower—he'll know when Cas is finally out because there won’t be any passive-aggressively distinct gun-cleaning or map-pencil-sorting or artillery laptop-on-fire sounds.

He waits a long time. The cabin remains eerily quiet.

Finally he swallows, head still spinning, replaying what he heard. Cautiously, teeth set into his lower lip, he shifts his weight onto one hip and lifts up just enough to slip a hand (his left, Castiel would be fascinated to find out) inside his sweatpants.

**Author's Note:**

> Without impossibly brainy and generous beta [teamfreewilltheywontthey](http://teamfreewilltheywontthey.tumblr.com/), this would be even more unbelievably terrible. Anything you like about it almost certainly came from her suggestions, except for a couple of long passages in italics, lifted wholesale to provide context, from [seperis](http://seperis.tumblr.com), praise be unto her name forever! because she is literally writing endverse!Middlemarch. Finally, whether you're already an impassioned Agincourt fan or a newcomer, you can find other like-minded ~~doomsday sex cult~~ bookclub members on [tumblr](http://downtoagincourt.tumblr.com) and [twitter](http://twitter.com/downtoagincourt). Welcome to Chitaqua; we have coffee with cream and sugar, and fallen angels.


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